Fern: mamma draws a breath of relief

Sketch of Fern by her daughter.
From collection of Smith College.

Under the pen name "Fanny Fern," Sarah Willis Parton was known for being highly opinionated, assertive, and quite direct in her weekly newspaper columns. She was also a woman, a wife, and a mother. Her column for May 16, 1863 highlighted her experience with that last descriptor, describing the difficulty of putting a baby to bed:

How many tunes have sometimes to be hummed, how many walkings up and down the floor, how many trottings, how many rockings, how many feedings, before this desirable event comes off. At last the little lids give promise of drooping, the little waxen paws fall helpless, the little kicking toes are quiescent, mamma draws a breath of relief, as she pushes her hair off her heated face, and baby looks as if nothing on earth could ever disturb its serenity.

...Until "papa" comes home, that is, arriving with a "tramp, tramp, tramp" with his creaking boots. Mamma rushes to him "with warning forefinger on her lip," implores him to be silent. Papa, however, is assured that the kind of noise he makes would never wake a baby. She doesn't argue, knowing too well that "a man is never mistaken even with regard to a subject he knows nothing about." The next day, she slyly puts a pair of slippers at the bottom of the stairs, which "dear John" (as she calls him) puts on without thinking as soon as he comes home. Still, she worries that his whispering will wake the baby. As always, he is assured he is not capable of waking the baby.

Just then the large violet eyes unclose and the little mouth dimples into a pretty smile of recognition, and "dear John," whose attention is called to it, explains, peeping into the crib, "Well now, who'd have thought it," and creaks off down stairs...

Fern, as she called herself even in her personal life, was happily married to her third husband James Parton. She had three children from her first marriage (though one died in early infancy). By the time this column was written, Fern and Parton were living with Fern's young granddaughter Ethel (whose mother, Fern's daughter, had died the year before). Fern often referred to her husband's absent-mindedness and affectionately called him "The Philosopher."

*I found this column in Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman (1992) by Joyce Warren, which remains the best source on Fanny Fern.

Fern: the transparent mask of neutrality

The popular Fanny Fern (formerly known as Sarah Payson Willis) wrote nothing in her column about Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860, nor did she acknowledge the secession of a few Southern states from the Union. When shots were fired on Fort Sumter, however, she acknowledged the crisis at hand. Finally, on June 1, 1861, she published an article titled "The Time to Speak Out":

When timidity creeps into its hiding place, or measures its stealthy pace under the transparent mask of neutrality, then—God be thanked for the man of bold utterance! He refreshes us like the quick thunder storm, when the air grows too thick for breath.

Fern, perhaps upset at her own delay in speaking out as Civil War loomed, claimed that silence on important issues was unforgivable: "There be things worse than death." The italics are original. She continued:

When men walk with closed mouths, and averted eyes, nor dare look into the mirror of their own souls, and face the marring of God's image there... When with iron heel they crush out like so many insects, the soul's breath from thousands, and impiously say, "Am I not doing God's service?" Is it a time when the smoke of the pit ascends to the very nostrils, for men to coin pretty phrases?

Through her writings, Fern established herself quickly as a pro-Unionist. More importantly, she railed against apathy, implying that unconcern was the bigger cause of the problems of the United States (whether it was slavery, the Civil War, or the role of women in society). In a strange twist, when Lincoln called for more volunteers to enlist, the feminist Fern said that young men who refused to join should be given petticoats and sewing machines.

*The best source of information on Fern is Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman (1992) by Joyce Warren, from which I found the above information.

Guest post: Revealing Fanny Fern

Fanny Fern’s famous first novel, Ruth Hall, was released amid much hoopla in December 1854. Fern, the pseudonym for Sara Willis Eldredge Farrington, had recently left Boston and had settled in New York to write, first for the Musical World and Times and then for the New York Ledger. In the few years leading to the release of her first novel, critics and fans unsuccessfully tried to learn her identity and gender. Speculation about just who Fanny Fern really was rose to a fever pitch, especially upon the much-awaited release of Ruth Hall. Mason Brothers, her publisher, struggled to print enough copies to meet the never-before-seen demand for an American novel, yet utilized one of the most-successful early advertising campaigns to fuel that demand. Early critics insisted on reading the novel as autobiographically-based, something Mason Brothers denied, even as they publicized these speculations.

When Fern left Boston, she left behind her first two editors. One of those, William U. Moulton, editor of the True Flag, made it clear that he was bitter and angry at Fern for several reasons. Moulton was not used to dealing with a business-minded woman and resented Fern’s requests for earnings increases (to bring her income closer to a living wage) and especially resented her “abandoning” Boston (and the True Flag) for the greater earning power and prestige to be had in New York City. Although Moulton gladly profited from Fern’s pithy writing when he had her under his commission, nevertheless, he seemed disturbed and annoyed that she failed to conform to conventional feminine expectations of the era.

On December 30, 1854, just a few weeks after Ruth Hall was released, Moulton did the unthinkable – he outted Fanny Fern. Moulton announced that Fern’s identity was that of Sara Willis Eldredge Farrington, the scandalized ex-wife of Boston merchant Samuel Farrington, and, moreover, posited that Ruth Hall was a biographically-based novel laced with unflattering and, perhaps, false, representations of her family and acquaintances, including Moulton himself and Fern’s famous poet/editor brother, N. P. Willis. Fern’s novel, indeed, was biographically-based, and she wrote it with the assurance of anonymity. But, once her identity was known, it wasn’t difficult for readers to identify possible true-life models for the novel’s characters. Fern was hurled to the critical, though fascinated, masses, which devastated her personally, but ultimately led to making her book a phenomenal success.

*Debra Brenegan teaches English and Women’s Studies at Westminster College in Missouri. She is the author of Shame the Devil (SUNY Press), a historical novel based on the life of nineteenth-century journalist, novelist and feminist, Fanny Fern.

"Ruthless Hall" and the "chronicler of Idlewild"

Mason Brothers knew they had a good thing in Fanny Fern when they asked her to write a novel to publish. When she started writing it, they knew it would be controversial — and also knew they could capitalize on that controversy. Still, even the Mason Brothers might have been surprised at just how successful Ruth Hall became.

Advertisements released before the book's publication predicted the book was "destined to make a sensation." Sure enough, within days of its release in December 1854, critics realized the book was mean-spirited ("Ruthless Hall," Grace Greenwood called her) and, more importantly, that it was autobiographical. Of course, the real problem was that one of the villains in the book, Hyacinth Ellet, was apparently based on "the chronicler of Idlewild," the very popular writer Nathaniel Parker Willis.

On December 23, 1854, the Mason Brothers began advertising that the author never claimed it was autobiography and that critics were looking for trouble. They never denied that it was Willis (it was, after all) but it wasn't their fault that critics recognized an unflattering portrait of that famous writer. The ads inevitably drew more attention to the controversy, and sales of the book skyrocketed, adding up to some 70,000 copies sold.

But the Mason Brothers could not have anticipated William U. Moulton, the former employer of Fanny Fern (and soon to become husband of author and poet Louise Chandler). His embittered response ended the controversy once and for all. More on that in just a few days.

Fern: a nice time telling stories

Sketch of Fern by her daughter.
From collection of Smith College.

After the success of her book Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio, Fanny Fern (whose real name was Sarah Payson Willis) was in high demand. Within months of her first book, on September 6, 1853, she signed a contract with publishers Derby and Miller for two more. One was a sequel to her Fern Leaves, the second was a children's book, Little Ferns for Fanny's Little Friends. Fern, the mother of two surviving children and one who died in infancy, addressed young readers directly in her preface:

Aunt Fanny has written you some stories, which she hopes will please and divert you. She would rather have come to you, and told them, that she might have seen your bright faces; but as that could not be, she sends her little book instead. Perhaps you will sometime come and see her, and then won't we have a nice time telling stories?

In obtaining her copyright, Fern had to reveal her true identity to her publisher. Legally, she was still Mrs. Samuel Farrington; later in the month, she learned he finally filed for divorce after having left him two years earlier. It is speculated that what finally made him act after so long was his learning that he was not entitled to Fern's royalties.

One of the stories in the book features a character named "Floy" — the fictional pseudonym she used in her semi-autobiographical Ruth Hall, which she published the next year. As is true of most of her work, even Fern's children's book had some elements of her autobiography within it. The book concludes with a short sketch, "Children in 1853," which features a woman about to rent rooms from a willing landlord — until he learns his potential tenant had children. He gruffly says he never takes children, to which Fern muses, "Now, I'd like to know if that man was born grown up?" She imagines some day creating a colony only for children and when people like the landlord come looking for a place to live she would respond, "Never take grownup folks here, sir!"

Fern — or, rather, "Aunt Fanny" — concludes with her thoughts on children, including these recommendations:

I believe in great round apples and big slices of good plain gingerbread for children.
I believe in making their clothes loose enough to enable them to eat it all, and jump round in when they get through.
I believe in not giving away their little property, such as dolls, kites, balls, hoops, and the like, without their leave.
I believe in not promising them a ride, and then forgetting all about it.
I believe in not teasing them for amusement, and then punishing them for being "troublesome."

Fern: In the name of Adam and Eve

Under the pseudonym "Fanny Fern," Sarah Willis often wrote about the difficulty of being a woman in the 19th century. The traditional woman's dress, for example, was not often practical during the hottest period of the summer. On August 15, 1857, her weekly column for the New York Tribune was titled "A Hot Day":

Not a breath of air stirring, and mine almost gone. Fans enough, but no nerve to wield 'em... Chairs hot; sofa hotter, beds hottest... Every thing sticky, and flabby, and limpsey. Can't read; can't sew; can't write; can't talk; can't walk; can't even sleep... "Lady down stairs wishes to see me?" In the name of Adam and Eve, take all my dresses off the pegs and show her — but never believe I'd be so mad as to get into them for any body living.

Of course, Fern was often criticized for her directness in the face of the expected conventions (here, she implies that she was naked). Interestingly, this boldness was what also drew some of her greatest supporters, including Nathaniel Hawthorne. Calling Fern the exception to the "damned mob of scribbling women," he praised Fern as the only one willing to "throw off the restraints of decency, and come before the public stark naked, as it were."

It was not the only time Fern would rail against the need for women to follow accepted practices over function. The first evidence that Fern occasionally dressed in men's clothing is from the year before the above article. In 1856, she told a friend she had worn her husband James Parton's clothes. The friend didn't seem to mind, so long as she stayed indoors.

But, a year after "A Hot Day," she wrote another column in which she revealed an excursion into town with her husband. Dressed as a man, she felt a unique freedom: "But, oh, the delicious freedom of that walk... No skirts to hold up, or to draggle their wet folds against my ankles; no stifling veil flapping in my face, and blinding my eyes..." More easily avoiding puddles, stepping over obstacles, she realized that dresses (and the underlying petticoats) were much more of a burden than they were worth. "I want to do such a quantity of 'improper' things," she wrote.

Bicentennial of Fanny Fern

Sarah Payson Willis was born in Portland, Maine on July 9, 1811 to Nathaniel Willis and Hannah Parker Willis. Her father, an unofficial "deacon" at the Park Street Church in Boston, hoped to instill his daughter with piety by naming her after the Reverend Edward Payson. It did not work. Though educated well (even better than most girls), Sarah never seemed to fall in line with her father's religious beliefs.

Both her father and her brother Nathaniel Parker Willis were well-known and influential in literature and publishing — but did not financially support Sarah when she became destitute. No longer feeling like a member of the Willis family, with her first husband Charles Eldredge dead, and a divorce from her second husband Samuel Farrington pending, Sarah seemed to have lost her identity. As she turned to writing for income, she took the name Fanny Fern instead, beginning with the essay, "The Model Husband."

By the end of her life, Fern (she stopped using "Sarah" entirely) had published novels, short stories, and various essays. Among her works aimed at children was "The Policeman," which knocked down any expectations for happy birthdays.

...[Little Johnny] had beautiful presents, and a little sugared plumcake, made on purpose for him by his grandmother; and he was to have a little party in the evening, and ice cream and cake to eat; and they were to play blind man's buff, and all go to the circus in the evening...

Having just turned nine years old, he announces, "I want to be a policeman." At his age, however, it never occurred to him that an officer's job involved anything negative. Earlier, a policeman which had inspired little Johnny had heard the sobs of a little girl who, like Johnny, had turned nine years old that day.

He went into the room where the noise came from, and saw, not a birthday party, of warmly-dressed little children, and a bright fire, and pretty pictures on the walls, and such beautiful roses on the pretty carpet, that one almost hated to step on them. No, indeed! The floor was bare, and so were the walls; there was no bed in the room, no chairs, no tables; but on the floor lay a dead woman, and over her stood her own little girl, named Katy, only nine years old that very day... In her hand was a basket of cold victuals, that her mother had sent her out alone to beg; and there lay her mother, dead!

Though the officer was a stranger to young Katy, he offers to take her into his home and he and his wife raise her as their own daughter. This unsolicited act of kindness is severely contrasted with Fern's own life, when her own family refused to help her. Fern struggled for a time in boarding-houses, earning only a few dollars a week as a seamstress. Even when she turned to writing, her four to six articles a week earned her $6 to $20. What a relief it must have been when, years later, New York Ledger editor Robert Bonner paid her $100 a week.

Guest post: Fanny Fern’s “The Model Husband”

Sketch of Fern by her daughter.
From collection of Smith College.

Fanny Fern's first published article was "The Model Husband," published June 28, 1851 in the Olive Branch, and it appears to be a light-hearted sketch of the typical nineteenth-century woman’s ideal spouse. Her inversion of gender roles drives the comic innuendo, with her model husband dutifully taking over baby feedings through the night and even into the dreaded wee hours of the morning "while Mrs. Smith curls her hair." Fern’s details of the irksome tasks of childcare would have rung true with most young mothers at the time. The model husband cheerfully absorbs the annoyances and inconveniences normally saddled upon women of the era, down to "the soft molasses ginger bread that is rubbed into his hair, coat, and vest during these happy conjugal seasons." The humor also derives from Fern's sense of what women really wanted from a husband: time to curl their hair and "receive the congratulations of the parish gossips."

Yet Fern craftily hides a deeper need that she would more explicitly demand in her later works, especially Ruth Hall, published four years later. In it, Fern sketches a profile of her model husband as ideal publisher. Significantly, his greatest virtue is respect of her economic autonomy by paying her a fair wage and not interfering with her writing or her relationships with her readers. What women wanted more than time to curl their hair and gossip is signaled in the first sentence of "The Model Husband": “His pocket-book is never empty when his wife calls for money.” In 1851, Fern was writing for the Olive Branch under a paltry wage and stringent editorial constraints compared to those of her later position under Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger. Thus she did not feel at liberty to dilate upon men’s economic domination of women in the public sphere until landing her position with Bonner years later. Her depiction of women’s wants in a man in this early column, therefore, tend to feed directly into the sexist stereotype of women as self-indulgent creatures with no desire to produce outside of the domestic sphere.

Although "The Model Husband" appears radical for the time, it only vaguely hints at the bold revolutionary battle Fern would wage in Ruth Hall for women’s right to become professionals in an otherwise male-dominated public market. In Ruth Hall, her concern is to revise the publisher’s business ethic to allow room for well-paid professional female authors. Such a pioneering ideological stand would have been instantly censored in the Olive Branch. Yet Fern does manage in "The Model Husband" to subvert the dominant ideology of the Cult of True Womanhood, especially according to Catharine Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy (1846). Specifically, she inverts True Womanhood’s demand that women submissively self-sacrifice out of duty to their families by instead indulging middle class women’s forbidden urges—all of which are harmless and perfectly reasonable—that their conventional roles systematically deny.

In crafting "The Model Husband," Fern thus expresses her complaints about the inadequacy of typical accepted male roles in the positive light of female fantasy rather than the polemic condemnations and diatribes she would frequently vent in her later Ledger columns. In Ruth Hall, she would savage former stingy and abusive employers like so many bad ex-husbands. The dark underside of "The Model Husband" is that Fern herself endured perhaps the worst marital nightmare imaginable. During her brief torturous second marriage, her husband Samuel Farrington chronically raped her, driving her to seek shelter in a hotel. Ironically, Fern had originally gravitated to him to assuage her financial needs since he was a model husband whose "pocket-book is never empty." The seeming panacea of the wealthy husband freely sharing his cash with his wife came at a great cost to Fern personally, and she would finally tell the full story of this aborted marriage in her second novel, Rose Clark. Thus her tone in "The Model Husband" remains genial if only to mask the lion she would unleash in her later works.

*David Dowling teaches in the English Department of the University of Iowa. He is the author of several books on 19th century writers, including Chasing the White Whale: The Moby-Dick Marathon; or, What Melville Means Today (University of Iowa Press, 2010) and the forthcoming Literary Partnerships and the Marketplace: Writers and Mentors in Nineteenth-Century America (to be released Fall 2011, Louisiana State University Press).

Fern: Great Plans for the Future

At a time when most American newspapers left their articles anonymous, the Irish-born Robert Bonner sought out famous names for his New York Ledger — and paid top dollar to secure their contributions. The focus on well-known bylines helped make that paper popular: between 1851 and 1860, its circulation grew from 2,500 to 400,00 copies. Perhaps no name was more responsible for Bonner's success than the one he announced on May 19, 1855:

GREAT ATTRACTION!
NEW STORY FOR THE LEDGER
by FANNY FERN!
GREAT PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

The article beneath this headline explained that Fanny Fern, a recent sensation after publishing her scandalously personal novel Ruth Hall, would earn pay equal to "the highest price that has ever been paid by any newspaper publisher to any author." Bonner was not exaggerating. Fern (the pen name of Sara Payson Willis) had struggled as a freelance magazine writer and had decided to focus on books. Bonner offered her $25 per column. She refused. He offered her $50, then $75, before finally settling on $100 per column — indeed, the highest price ever paid for such a writer. Bonner justified the high price tag in his announcement by describing her as "the most popular authoress in this or in any other country."

Fern began serializing "Fanny Ford" a month later, ultimately earning her $1000. Rival newspaper the New York Evening Mirror commented, "We certainly do not know which to admire most, the ability and perseverance of the lady in making a reputation that commands such unheard-of remuneration for the labors of her pen, or the enterprise of the publisher who pays for it." Impressed by Bonner's dedication (and genuine interest in paying what authors were worth), Fern soon agreed to an exclusive contract. She held her role as columnist for the Ledger for the rest of her life (and slightly beyond).

*For the information in this post, I turned to Joyce Warren's Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman (1992). Fern's bicentennial is coming up this summer; expect to read more about her here.

Fern and Whitman: You are delicious!

About a year after the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, America's most popular columnist wrote to the book's author. Fanny Fern was enthusiastic in her short letter to Walt Whitman, dated April 21, 1856:

You are delicious! May my right hand wither if I don't tell the world before another week, what one woman thinks of you. "Walt"? "what I assume, you shall assume!"

Fern then invited Whitman to spend an evening with her and her husband James Parton. Some scholars have suggested Fern had a romantic interest in Whitman, though there is no evidence for it.

The next month, Fern dedicated her weekly column to Leaves of Grass — a book which would soon become one of the most controversial in American literature for its frank depiction of sexuality and the human body. She called it, "Well baptized: fresh, hardy and grown for the masses." Both Fern and Whitman made light of more serious subject matters by using a pun in their book titles, specifically the term "leaves" for "pages." Fern's book, Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio, predated Leaves of Grass by only a couple years.

When they met in 1856, they were at markedly different points in their career. Fern was the highest paid newspaper writer of the day and had published four books successfully, including Ruth Hall. Whitman was unemployed after serving as a struggling journalist. His first book, Franklin Evans (a temperance novel), made no impact and he had to self-publish Leaves of Grass at his own expense. Of Whitman's book, Fern emphasized she could "extract no poison from these 'Leaves'."

Willises: Thy children bless thee

Richard Storrs Willis did not generally get involved with the bickering between his older siblings, sister Fanny Fern and brother Nathaniel Parker Willis. When Fern produced her semi-autobiographical novel Ruth Hall in 1854, he did not appear to have reason to be upset. N. P. Willis was the villain of the book, renamed Hyacinth Ellet, but Richard Storrs was completely left out. However, the elder Mr. Ellet character, the father of Hyacinth and the title character Ruth Hall, was painted unsympathetically. The father of the book, of course, was also based on the father of the real-life counterparts, Nathaniel Willis, Sr., the founder of America's first children's periodical, Youth's Companion.

As editor of The Musical World and Times in New York, Richard Storrs (a composer whose most famous tune was "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear") responded to the negative depiction of his father. In the January 13, 1855 issue of the journal, he republished his brother's poem "To My Aged Father" (originally published in their father's Youth's Companion):

...Faint has thy heart become. For peace thou prayest—
For less to suffer as thy strength grows less.
For, oh, when life has been a stormy wild—
The bitter night too long, the way too far—
The aged pilgrim, ere he lays him down,
Prays for a moment's lulling of the blast—
A little time to wind his cloak about him,
And smooth his gray hairs decently to die.

Yet, oh, not vain the victories unsung!
Not vain a life of industry to bless.
And thou, in angel-history—where shine
The silent self-forgetful who toil on
For others until death—art nam'd in gold.
In heaven it is known, thou hast done well!
But, not all unacknowledg'd is it, here.
Children thou hast, who, for free nurture, given
With one hand while the other fought thy cares,
Grow grateful as their own hands try the fight.
And more—they thank thee more! The name thou leavest
Spotless and blameless as it comes from thee—
For this, their pure inheritance—a life
Of unstained honor gone before our own—
The father that we love " an honest man"—
For this, thy children bless thee...

The same day, January 13, 1855, Nathaniel Parker Willis responded in his own periodical, Home Journal, claiming that he had gone some time without saying "an unkind word" to his sister but steadfastly chose to forebear "the malignity and injustice." Fanny Fern's harsh words about her family in Ruth Hall left them only "temporarily strained" and she was soon forgiven by all — all except N. P. Willis, that is.

Fanny Fern and James Parton

Fanny Fern (pen name of Sara Payson Willis) had garnered major popularity through works like her semi-autobiographical novel Ruth Hall. Taking advantage of her success, the New York Ledger contracted with Fern as a columnist. The first of what her editors called her "spirited, lively, dashing, unrivalled sketches" appeared in the January 5, 1856 issue. Within a year, circulation increased by over 100,000 new subscribers.

Fern agreed to write exclusively for the Ledger, a deal she maintained until her death. Her weekly column appeared — without missing an issue — for 16 years. At $100 an article, she became America's highest-paid columnist for a time.

On the same date six years earlier, January 5, 1850, Fern's brother Nathaniel Parker Willis published the first article by a writer using the name "Currer Bell" (a pseudonym inspired by Charlotte Bronte) in his Home Journal. That writer was James Parton (pictured), who soon became an editor alongside Willis. Parton began publishing Fern's articles in the Home Journal — without Willis's blessing. In a move that has perpetually baffled scholars, the amiable Willis angrily forbade the publication of Fanny Fern in his magazine. In protest, Parton resigned. Perhaps in gratitude for his loyalty, shortly after Ruth Hall was published, she convinced her publishers to produce a book by Parton. The two soon built up a strong personal relationship.

In fact, Fern and Parton were married in Hoboken, New Jersey on the same day her first New York Ledger article was published — after signing a prenuptial agreement that ensured her literary earnings remained solely her own. He was her third husband and eleven years her junior.

*Much of the information in this article is found in Joyce Warren's Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman.

Fern: I thank thee that I live

After 16 and a half years, the final column by Fanny Fern was published on October 12, 1872 — two days after her death. Fern, whose birth name was Sara Payson Willis, had printed her column continuously, without exception, every week in the New York Ledger since 1856. Her weekly salary made her the highest-paid columnist in the United States.

Fern's life, however, was not easy. Her first husband died in 1845 and she turned to her wealthy and influential brother, the writer Nathaniel Parker Willis. For reasons still unknown today, he shunned her. She married again but divorced shortly after. She wrote children's stories and a newspaper column, attracting the attention of James Parton, editor of the Home Journal (owned by Willis). He printed some of her work and, when Willis protested, he resigned as editor. Shortly after, Fern and Parton married (he was 11 years younger).

Fern's major break was the book Ruth Hall (1854), which fictionalized some of her unhappy experiences in her second marriage as well as a depicting thinly-veiled caricature of Willis, renamed "Hyacinth Ellet" — an effeminate, obnoxious editor who tries to sabotage the literary ambitions of the title character. The book sold 100,000 copies in one year, ultimately arguing that women need to financially support themselves.

Fern suffered for some time with cancer, at one point losing the use of her right arm. No matter; she wrote with her left instead. Her final column was titled "End of the Summer Season." In it, she wrote about a vacation:

As for me, whether I go early or late, whether my eyes are open or shut, memory will always make pictures for me... which makes me say with Festus, "Oh, God, I thank thee that I live."

Her editor, Robert Bonner, ordered the next issue of the Ledger print its editorial page with black edges representing mourning. He wrote, "Her success was assured, because she had something to say, and knew how to say it."

*I cannot recommend strongly enough Joyce W. Warren's Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman, which was used as a major source for this post.